Here we discuss ElasticSearch Machine Learning. ML is an add-on to ElasticSearch that you can purchase with a standalone installation or pay as part of the monthly Elastic Cloud subscription.

(This article is part of our ElasticSearch Guide. Use the right-hand menu to navigate.)

ElasticSearch Machine Learning

The term machine learning has a broad definition. It is a generic term handed over to the laymen as a way of avoiding discussing the specifics of the various models.

To be specific what ElasticSearch ML does is unsupervised learning time series analysis. That means it draws conclusions from a set of data instead of using training a model (i.e., supervised learning) to make predictions, like you would with regression analysis using different techniques, including neural networks, least squares, or support vector machines.

How is this Useful

To see the value of unsupervised learning time series analysis consider the typical approach to cybersecurity or application performance monitoring. That is to assume data follows a normal (gaussian) distribution and then select some threshold that one considers significant when flagging outliers.

This is the familiar bell curve approach. Even if one does not think of it that way, that’s what they are doing. This curve is described by terms the highschool math student should know: mean, variance, and standard deviation. But that is not machine learning.